Google penalty types and intensity

Google Penalty is a common term for SEO experts but often few type of Google penalties gets overlooked when working on SEO factors. We mostly think that whitehat SEO can save us from such penalties but reverse can also strike your site right when you are just finished and relaxed about your site SEO. So, we will discuss here what are the types of Google Penalty and factors that may trigger Google Penalty.

Types of Google Penalty

Google disciplinary body use to enforce a wide range of penalty setup, whose intensity would vary from minor to major causing drop in page rank to drop in search result ranking or permanent banning from search engine depending upon the factors triggering the penalty. Let us have a look about the types of penalties issued by Google and their intensity.

Disclaimer: Below mentioned are either my personal observations or based upon collection of experiences from various forums. It may differ from your experience but it worth reading as it can aware you about possible penalties by Google to your site.

1. Drop in Page Rank - A drop in Page rank always sting a serious website owner with already higher page rank. It may not sting to webmasters having lower PR because Google Page Rank scale is not linear but works exponentially. It needs more quality backlinks to get a hike from PR 5 - PR 6 in compare to getting PR 2 - PR 3. This drop generally cause due to getting linked with non quality backlinks, broken links, though rare sudden drop in content updating frequency, some duplicate content or few other related minor issues.

2. Google Search ranking drop - You may find that your webpage ranks high in search engine results for some specific sets of keywords. But after a certain period you may notice drop in search result ranking. This may be due to Google penalty, but may not be so. A higher Google search engine ranking depends upon several factors, one of which is keyword density, keyword relevancy, meta tag factors, content quality and so on never disclosed by Google itself. This penalty may be imposed due to some malpractices done for manipulating Google algorithm for keyword stuffing, non relevant content, non relevant keywords etc which gradually gets detected by search engines and penalized.
But it is not always so, the drop may be due to the fact that some other websites have updated their content which shows higher relevancy for the searched keyword than your webpage.

3. Google sandbox Penalty - Google sandbox penalty will be generally implemented on new websites who tends to acquire backlinks in rapid pace in order to get higher page rank. This is an effort from Google to prevent crossing the tipping point of ethical SEO. In sandbox penalty the consequences are drastic drop in search ranking but not instantly de-indexing.

4. De-indexing - De-indexing from search result is the worst thing that you can expect about Google Penalty. This can be for few days, months or permanent removal/ banned from indexing in Google. This penalty is imposed when the site has over done any severe offence by breaking the TOS of Google by Black Hat SEO techniques, hyper spamming or creation of complete duplication of any site or any other mal practice to manipulate Google algorithm.

Google Page rank explained

Since last few years Google has proved its efficiency for being the best among search engines in regards of serving the most relevant result to its search users. Being one of the most popular search engine, all the publishers from around the world are now competing to get at the higher position of search result in Google. Google has few sets of algorithm to take any website to its top search result and Google Page rank is among the top of many other factors used to decide such ranking.

What is Google Page Rank?

Google page rank is the measure of page authenticity set by Google based upon certain criteria. The higher the page rank alloted, the higher the chances of the page to get higher position in search ranking in Google.

How higher Google page rank are alloted?

Higher Google page rank can be achieved with more and more back links. Google allots page rank based on how much back links does a page have. But getting a lots of back links does not assure that your page will get higher Google page rank because it also depends upon the quality of back links achieved by the page. The higher the quality of back links, the more will be the rank.
The high quality of back links are those links coming from sites already have higher Google page rank. This is also followed by consideration about how much the site is relevant to the site from where the links are coming. If the back links are coming from one of the relevant site with higher Google page rank then it is considered as very quality back link in compare to those coming from non-relevant pages /sites.

Is Google page rank all for higher ranking in Google Search Engine?

Google page rank are set between 1 and 10. Getting more page rank only increases your web page's chances to get rank at top of search results but it does not assure you about that because there are several other factors considered for search engine ranking viz. - keyword density, most relevant content, some times page popularity about particular search etc. So, Google page rank may be a primary factors among many others but it is not all to decide your search engine ranking. You may even find lots of other websites with "0" (Zero) page rank to get at the top of particular search.